Philosophy

The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature’s centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature’s rivals for cultural attention were on the rise—film was becoming a more significant part of people’s media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing—but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction—detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance—was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention.

 

This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration—all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and not very far at all.

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Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity.

Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages—intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.

Disocunt code CUP@) gives 20% off at Columbia UP site.

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